Friday, May 19, 2017

Google Pixel And Pixel XL Will Support Project Treble, Possibly Meaning Longer Support

Recently, Google announced Project Treble which is a part of Android O and means that the operating system gets a modular reason, something that described by Google as the biggest change so far of Android's lower architecture.

Whenever a device stops getting Android updates, most of the time the maker of your device's processor (e.g. Snapdragon or MediaTek) never updated the drivers for newer versions of Android. This is why no phones or tablets with the Snapdragon 800/801 chip ever officially received Android 7.0 Nougat, including the Nexus 5.The purpose of Project Treble is to make it easier for manufacturers to release updates to new versions of the platform. Although Google did not mention anything about the matter Specifically, it may also mean that devices are updated for a longer period than before, when the code for chipp is handled in a new way.

This will solve this particular problem by separating the Android OS from the 'Vendor interface'. The vendor interface under Project Treble is also designed to be forwards-compatible, meaning that it shouldn't have to be updated for every Android update, in theory.During one of today's Android Fireside Chats at Google I/O, Dave Burke (VP of engineering for Android) revealed that the current Google Pixel and Pixel XL will work with Project Treble. Normally, only phones that ship with Android O will work with Treble, but the Pixel will be an exception.

Let's see whether this will give Pixel phones a longer support period than previous Nexus devices. Google has only promised two years of software updates with three years of security patches for the Pixel and Pixel XL. Project Treble could extend that even further - we'll have to wait and see.